Sunday, September 30, 2007

Making Lemon Aide

I would be very tempted to vote for them. Seven candidates for the new Women’s Party standing for election in the October 21st elections in Poland have posed nude for a campaign poster, shielded only by a sign that reads in Polish, “Everything for the future…and nothing to hide.” The party’s founder, Manuel Gretowska, explained, “We are beautiful, nude, proud.” But then she quickly added, “This is not pornography. There is nothing to see in terms of sex.” But then why point out that the ladies were not wearing bathing suits behind the sign?
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It sounds to me like a direct attempt to deal with that Madonna slash whore dichotomy that Madonna has exploited so well in her own career, and it shadows the absurd Republican noise machine’s alleged concern over Hillary’s cleavage displayed on the floor of the Senate. Women have been stigmatized as too emotional and too compassionate for executive positions for the last 4,000 years, while sex appeal clearly helped Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton attract the bimbo vote, and probably got Warren G. Harding elected President as well. So why shouldn’t women, handed lemons by biology, use their tits to attract a few ‘Mimbo’ votes? (Which is not to suggest I have even noticed if Hillary has a cleavage, …which she doesn’t.) I would say the Polish Women’s Party is just looking for a little lemon aide.
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As anyone who has ever eaten at a franchise steak house in America can testify, a lot of what the menu defines as “steak” ain’t steak. (i.e.,Ground Round is never steak!) But as the price of real steak goes up retailers and customers are desperately searching for an affordable alternative. In Britain a suspicious investigative reporter for an ITV program (“Undercover, Mum”) actually subjected so-called steaks from 15 JD Wetherspoon’s and Greene King’s Hungry Horse franchise pubs and found that while the occasionally hard to chew product was beef it was not from the huge healthy British Herefords or Angus cattle the diners might of imagined. Instead the beef was from something called a zebu.

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Also known as “the humped cattle”, zebus originated in India and have been cross bred in North and South America and Central Africa. Their long droopy ears and dewlap chins are adaptations to hot muggy mosquito filled climates like central Africa and Brazil and Florida in the U.S. but that does not improve the palatability of their meat. The Hungry Horse denied that any of their rubber-like steaks were zebu. But JD Witherspoon’s took a different tact. They responded to the program by pointing out that the, “zebu is…taxonomically identical to any other bread of cattle.” Yea; and Hilary Clinton is taxonomically identical to George Bush, but that doesn’t make him any easier to swallow.
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People who call in sick to work on a regular basis are also taxonomically identical to the average person, but the average person is likely to consider these folks to be flakes or bums. But a Berlin psychiatrist has redefined all these lazy good-for-nothings as “laborophobics”, whom he identifies as people who suffer from an irrational work-related anxiety disorder which strikes people who do not suffer from general anxiety disorders; it is characterized by “…panic, hypochondriac fears, work-related worrying, (and) post-traumatic stress…”. In fact Dr. Micheal Linden suggests that laborophobia accounts for half of all workers on long term sick leave. Me, I haven’t had an honest job for years. I’m a writer. Hillary is a politician. And I would say that George Bush is evidently a narrow minded, bone headed, self centered, self obsesse, idiot. And probably a laborophobic as well.
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Death can be a major employment challenge, even more so than laborophobia. Still when Judge Robert Barnet in Muncie, Indiana, received a faxed copy of an obituary from the local newspaper, the Star Press, for defendant Shawnda Hatfield, who was awaiting sentencing in his court after being found guilty of kiting a check against her former employer, he was a little suspicious. And when he checked the contact number left in the obit for the Florida crematorium listed in her obituary, to confirm Shawnda’s timely demise, he grew even more suspicious. The number had a 765 area code, which is the same code as that used in Muncie, and not a 239, or a 305 or any other area code used in Florida. The mystery (such as it was) was solved when sheriff’s officers knocked on the front door of Shawnda’s home in nearby Dunkirk, Indiana, and who should answer the door but the recently cremated Shawnda. Judge Hatfield then sentenced Shawnda’s ash to four years in jail.
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Sometimes the good Lord doesn’t just give you lemons; sometimes it rains lemons. Such was the fate of the citizens of the tiny Andean village of Puna, Peru. On September 15th something “glowing” smashed into the ground just outside the village, leaving behind a 44 foot wide crater, 16 foot deep, and something else as well, something that made 500 village families sick, dizzy, with headaches, scratchy throats and vomiting. Seven police officers, dispatched to collect samples of the space invader from the now water filled crater, also suffered from the same symptoms and had to be admitted to a hospital. Pravda, the Russian news agency, reported authoritatively that the object that fell to earth was the remains of a nuclear reactor from an American KH 13 satellite, spying on Iran. It was leaking radiation, said Pravda, and was what was making the villagers sick.
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But scientists from Peru’s Mining and Mineralogical Institute disagreed, identifying the object as a typical Chondrite iron meteorite. And while there clearly were odors emanating from the crater, they admitted, they said they detected no radiation. And people who had not visited the crater were suffering along with those who had gotten close to the hole.
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But any concerns about invading bugs from outer space or radiation from a spy satellite were forgotten as when Marco Limachi stepped forward. He was the district authority on the scene and he knew just what had to be done. First a roof had to be erected over the crater so it could be protected and "studied" year round because, “…we want to sell the crater’s image…”. Porfirio Aguilar, director of tourism in Puno, even suggested that Peruvian authorities should get together with neighbor and sometimes enemy Bolivia to cooperate in promoting tourism to the area. In fact, I can almost see the posters at the new “Puno International Spaceport, where everything is for the future…and nothing is hidden.”
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Except, as the old strippers used to say, you should always keep something hidden, else why should the audience come back tomorrow? Just ask Hillary; she knows how the game is played. And by God, this time she intends to play it to win.
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Posted by KAMuston at Saturday, September 29, 2007

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